was three years before he finally dropped the idea of a conventional novel and sim- plywrote down what had happened. This was the celebrated scroll, a continuous length of paper, a hundred and twenty feet long, on which Kerouac typed the first complete draft of the book in three weeks in April, 1951, with the assistance of his second wife, Joan Haverty, and a lot of coffee. (Not, as legend has it, Benze- drine-which is not to say that Kerouac was a stranger to amphetamines.) He im- mediately retyped the book on regular paper, and then spent six years revising it. Howard Cunnell's useful edition, "On the Road: The Original Scroll" (Viking; $29.95), makes it clear that, despite his later talk about the spontaneous method of composition, Kerouac did not create the published book in a single burst of in- spiration. It was the deliberate and ardu- ous labor of years. The literature of the road is immense. (One work not often mentioned as a pos- sible influence on Kerouac is Woody Guthrie's autobiography, "Bound for Glory," which was published in 1943. It's more Okie than jivey, but it aspires to the same beatness and the same lyricism of place.) "On the Road" is as self-con- sciously a work of literature as "À la Re- cherche du Temps Perdu"-and Proust was a writer whom both Kerouac and Cassady emulated, someone who turned his life into literature. Kerouac read widely and intelligently: he knew what he was doing when he put the scroll into the typewriter, and, just as important, he knew what he was not doing, what kind of book he was not writing-just as (to take a common and apt contemporary com- parison) Jackson Pollock knew that he was not making an easel painting, with all the aesthetic assumptions that that im- plied, when he put a canvas on the floor and poured paint on it. Kerouac credited the inspiration for the scroll to Cassady-specifically, to a long letter, supposedly around thirteen thousand words, that Cassady wrote over several days (he was on speed) in Decem- ber, 1950. This is known as the "Joan letter," because its ostensible subject is a girlfriend of Cassady's named Joan An- derson. But the letter, or the portion of it that survives (the original is lost, a holy Beat relic), is actually a hyper, funny, un- inhibited account of Cassady's sexual misadventures with a different girlfriend. It has no stylistic pretensions; it's just a this- happened -and - then - that- happened piece of personal correspondence. Ker- ouac was knocked out by it. "I thought it ranked among the best things ever writ- ten in America," he wrote to Cassady. It had the vernacular directness and narra- tive propulsion he was looking for, and it gave him the impulse he needed to tape his scroll together and get a com- plete draft on paper. He saw that this- happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vi- sion. (A little later, Frank O'Hara made poems using the same theory. "I do this, I do that" is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoid- ing form. In religious terms (and Ker- ouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self- mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline. N ostalgia is part of the appeal of "On the Road" today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen -fifties. It's a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his trav- els, there were three million miles of in- tercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When "On the Road" came out, there was roughly the same amount of high- way, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phe- nomenology of driving. Kerouac's orig- inal plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Province- town that reads "Bishop, CA., 3205 miles," few people would dream of tak- ing that road even as far as Rhode Is- land. They would get on the interstate. And they wouldn't think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is lit- tle romance left in long car rides. In fact, the characters in "On the Road" spend as short a time on the road as they can. They're not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is es- sential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, be- cause they're always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of the book takes place in cit- ies, particularly New York, Denver, and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even there, the characters are always rushing around. The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snap- shots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the post- war boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-to- gether existences and men wandered the " bl .' d " . h G h country- ram In roun , In t e ut- rie song-following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank's photographs in "The Americans," taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by post- war affluence and consumerism. The sadness that soaks through Ker- ouac's story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant work- ers and cowboys and crazy joyriders-the world ofN eal Cassady and his derelict fa- ther-is dying. But the sadness is not sen- timentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the lit- erary man's nostalgie de fa boue; they are restless, lonely, lost-beat. "There ain't no flowers there," says a girl whom Sal Par- adise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. "I want to go to New York. I'm sick and tired of this. Ain't no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain't nothin in Cheyenne." "Ain't nothin . N 'I k, " Sal " H II h .,,, In ew.L or says. e t ere aln t, she says. She wants to get in the car, too. A nd the car is the place to be. Why? The obvious answer is that nothing happens in the car. Everyone has an irre- sistible urge to get to Denver or San Fran- cisco or New York, because there will be THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 91